Attacks on dissident’s brother’s home persist

TAIWAN CONNECTION:：Chen Guangfu says the attacks began on April 18, the day his brother was put on the village’s CCP blacklist because he is planning to visit Taipei

Reuters, BEIJING

Wed, May 01, 2013 - Page 6

Security personnel in eastern China are carrying out a nightly harassment campaign against the brother of Chinese rights activist Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), the two said yesterday, throwing rocks, bottles and dead poultry at his house for 12 nights in a row.

The attacks on the village home of Chen Guangfu (陳光福) continued early yesterday, he said. Two cars parked outside his house in Shandong Province, shining their headlights through the windows and again security personnel threw rocks and beer bottles at the house and into the yard, he said.

“This is a country of hoodlums, not a country of law,” Chen Guangcheng said of China from New York, where he is studying law at New York University.

“If you have principles, if you do what is right, why are you afraid of people?” he said. “Why do these kinds of things in the middle of the night? What kind of person does this? Only thieves and the narrow-minded, spreading unchecked. But that’s how the [Chinese] Communist Party [CCP] is now.”

Chen Guangcheng made world headlines last year when he escaped house arrest and spent 20 hours on the run alone before meeting up with supporters who helped get him to Beijing where he was given refuge at the US embassy. He was then allowed permission to go to the US to study.

Chen Guangfu, 56, said the attacks started on April 18, the same day his brother was put on a village CCP blacklist for his plans to visit Taiwan and, the party said, Tibet.

“They said he is planning to go to Taiwan to work on Taiwan independence, and to go to Tibet to support Tibet independence,” Chen Guangfu said.

Chen Guangcheng has accepted an invitation to visit Taiwan next month.

Reached in at his home in Dongshigu village, Chen Guangfu said the security personnel arrived just after 2am yesterday, around the same time they had been arriving since April 18.

“They don’t speak, they just do this,” he said. “They throw things, put up little posters, they uproot my trees, pull out the vegetables my mother has been growing — these kinds of things to try to scare us.”

Police did not answer calls made from his telephone, he said, and had refused to investigate the attacks.

He also said his son, Chen Kegui (陳克貴), has been denied medical parole, although he is suffering from appendicitis.

Chen Kegui has been subjected to beatings and mistreatment since he fought with officials who stormed his house a year ago to look for his uncle. He was sentenced to three years in prison, and on the one monthly visit he’s allowed, he told his father on Thursday last week that he was in pain and had appendicitis, according to the Washington-based prisoner advocacy group Freedom Now.

Chen Guangfu said he tried to see his son again on Monday at Linyi prison, but was rebuffed and told Kegui’s application for medical parole was denied.